The Life of Groundbreaking Designer Virgil Abloh

Groundbreaking fashion designer Virgil Abloh became the first Black American artistic director of a luxury French fashion house when he became the artistic director of the menswear ready-to-wear collection for Louis Vuitton. He died in 2021 at the age of 41. Biographer Robin Givhan discusses her new book, Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh.

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Coming up on the show tomorrow, we're going to preview HBO's new two-part documentary about Billy Joel. NPR calls it revelatory. Co-director Susan Lacy joins us to discuss. On Friday's show, we'll talk about the new post-apocalyptic film 40 Acres. It stars Danielle Deadwyler, and she'll join us along with Director R.T. Thorne. That's in the future. Let's get this hour started.

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In 2021, the fashion world mourned Louis Vuitton's menswear artistic director Virgil Abloh after he died of a rare form of cancer at just 41 years old. A new biography and cultural history revisits his remarkable rise to fame. It's titled Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh. Born to Ghanaian parents, it traces his upbringing in Rockford, Illinois, to studying architecture to the founding of his brand, Off-White.

The book reflects on the characteristics which allowed Abloh to make it in high fashion. First, he had talent, but he could also communicate well, and he had a penchant for social media marketing and a unique theory on what made something fashionable. A Rolling Stone review states, "Make It Ours is at once a remarkable biography of a singular creative force and a powerful meditation on fashion and race, taste and exclusivity, genius and luxury." Make It Ours is on shelves now. Joining me now is the book's author. Robin Givhan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and the current senior critic-at-large at The Washington Post. It is really nice to speak with you.

Robin Givhan: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: In the book, you said Virgil saw himself more as a creative than a designer. In your mind, what's the difference between a creative and a designer?

Robin Givhan: Well, I think the biggest difference is in many ways the breadth of ambition. I think for the traditional classic designer, the focus is on the clothing, and it's about being able to use clothing as your form of communication. That's your vocabulary. There is a tendency to want to be as eloquent and articulate as possible as you communicate with that fashion vocabulary.

For Virgil, being a creative meant that you had a wide range of vocabularies available to you. He used fine arts, and he used furniture-making, and he used DJing. All of that was part of the way that he communicated. As a result, I don't think that fashion was necessarily the strongest element in his repertoire, but it was the one that I think was the loudest.

Alison Stewart: You said that at first, Virgil Abloh was a bit of a riddle to you. When did you first become aware of him?

Robin Givhan: I really focused my coverage on women's wear, even though I started off in covering the industry on the men's side, so his work was always in my peripheral vision, because he really started in menswear, and before that, he started as an assistant and then a colleague of the artist formerly known as Kanye West. Kanye's ambitions in fashion were quite well known, and Virgil was usually with him.

In many ways, my first encounter with Virgil was as this guy, sitting in on a fashion show, just taking it all in. Then, when he launched his brand, he was a semifinalist in a big fashion competition, the LVMH Prize. That's when I really had a chance to meet him and to talk to him about his work, but he was always a presence because he was so interested in fashion. He was a fan even when he was very much outside the center ring, and he was, in particular, a fan of Louis Vuitton.

Alison Stewart: When you first spoke to him, I think it was on Zoom. What did you talk about?

Robin Givhan: I had a chance to moderate a conversation and interview him in front of a group of students who were all part of a scholarship fund that he had created, and it was, I think, in many ways, the essence of Virgil, right? Beforehand, one-on-one, he was the same as he was in front of students, and he would say to them, as the time moved on in the conversation, "Oh, I have plenty of time. Keep the questions coming. Keep the questions coming."

He was very much someone who wanted to break down the barriers. He wanted to be transparent about the way the industry worked, and he wanted them to understand that just because you don't have the qualifications that have been deemed important in order to reach a particular goal, it doesn't necessarily mean that those are the only qualifications, and the ones that you might have can be different, but that doesn't mean they're any less valuable.

Alison Stewart: That's good advice for anybody right now if you think about it.

Robin Givhan: Right? Yes, I use that advice.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Washington Post senior critic-at-large, Robin Givhan. Her new book is a biography and a cultural history of Virgil Abloh's rise. It's titled Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh. You spent a lot of time in your book discussing Rockford, Illinois, which is where he grew up. First of all, why did you want to spend so much time describing Rockford, Illinois?

Robin Givhan: Well, Virgil talked a lot about doing things to impress the 17-year-old version of himself. He spent a lot of time celebrating 17-year-olds, teenagers, young people, and really expressing how he valued their point of view. He valued what they thought was important. He valued their sense of style, so I knew that any biography that tried to explore his fashion origins really needed to start with the 17-year-old Virgil.

When he was 17 years old, he was living in Rockford, Illinois, and he was going to a Catholic high school. Rockford was interesting to me because, often, Virgil would be described as having grown up in a suburb of Chicago, and Rockford is 90 miles outside of Chicago. It is equidistant between Chicago and the Iowa border, and it's very close to Wisconsin, so it is very Midwestern. It's an industrial city. It is small.

You can very quickly go from modest, Rust Belt era downtown to cornfields, and I think it was important that people understood that this was someone who came to fashion from a real dreamer's perspective, not someone who had firsthand being able to see all the big designers, right there, just down the street, and I think it was important also to understand that in many ways, Rockford was segregated, that it struggled with segregation in its school system even in the 1990s, and that in his decision, in his desire to go to this Catholic high school, which he had asked his parents if he could attend, that he was very much a minority within a minority there.

I think all of those things were really important in shaping the way that he saw himself in relationship to the fashion industry and the way that he saw himself as someone who spent a lot of time living in the in-between spaces, and that you could flourish in those spaces.

Alison Stewart: It was interesting how Catholic school helped shape, I don't know if 'philosophy' is the right word, or his aesthetic, in a way.

Robin Givhan: Yes, he didn't have to wear a uniform, but they still had to come to class, shirt and tie, and I was struck by the way the president of the school describes some of the fundamentals that they taught there, far outside of the basic subjects. She said that they, they wanted their students to have the soft skills of life, and by that she meant the ability to walk into a room with adults and equip themselves well to know how to engage people, to come in with the firm handshake and to send the follow-up note and to send flowers if necessary, to be charming, for lack of a better word.

Down the line, a lot of people talked about Virgil's incredible emotional IQ and his ability to engage with people, to be so likable in an industry where that can sometimes be challenging, and to just be able to be the person that people wanted to work with.

Alison Stewart: His parents, did they believe in that version of education, or were they about the capital E education, as immigrants?

Robin Givhan: They were very much about the capital E education. That is one of the reasons why Virgil studied engineering in college. He said, "My parents gave up a lot. They came to this country. They wanted an engineer for a son. The least I could do was give them an engineer."

Alison Stewart: In studying architecture, did it seem that his mind was on designing not just buildings, but something else?

Robin Givhan: I think he described the decision to study architecture as, it was the bridge between something that felt very analytical, the engineering, and his desire and his interests in things that were creative. Even during college and high school, he was a DJ. He took an art history class towards the very end of his college career on the Renaissance period and was just really engaged and lured in by this idea that art could change a culture, that it could have that big of an impact on a society.

When he started at the Illinois Institute of Technology for Architecture, he didn't want to be an architect and something that he did not tell his parents that, but he was really interested in the thought process of architects and what it meant to be able to explore the idea that design could impact economics. It could impact civic life. It could impact the aesthetics of an entire community.

Alison Stewart: Before we leave young Virgil Abloh, I have to ask about his career. He was a soccer player. He wasn't necessarily the best soccer player, but his coach said he was part of the whole process. He wouldn't expect anything. What did that mean to you?

Robin Givhan: To me, it underscored that he understood the importance of collaboration, that being a part of the team was in some ways as satisfying, if not more satisfying, than being necessarily the star or going it alone. I think that was something that stayed with him, and it was instructive in the way that he built a community of artistic people around him, and it was also, I think, in some ways, a kind of bridge-building activity because it was a soccer team. Soccer is certainly popular here, but it's very much an international sport, and I think that, to some degree, also appealed to him.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Washington Post senior critic-at-large, Robin Givhan. Her new book is Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh. When does fashion enter the picture for Virgil Abloh?

Robin Givhan: It was always bubbling underneath the surface, right? When he was a teenager, he was into the skatewear brands, fascinated by the big designer brands, particularly Vuitton. Early on, he talks about saving up his pennies and buying this little keychain pouch from Vuitton, the least expensive thing that the brand sold that he could afford, but it really enters the picture when he is in architecture school, and he starts silk-screening T-shirts.

The fascination grows through his relationship with Kanye West, who was desperate to start his own fashion line, and at a certain point, Virgil, who's working with him and becomes his creative director, traveling 300 days a year, says to himself, "What am I building for me?" He begins by creating this art project, he called it, that was called Pyrex Vision, and he essentially bought deadstock Ralph Lauren rugby shirts and silk-screened them with the words "Pyrex 23."

He bought these shirts for about $30, $40 a piece; he sold them for well over $500, and they sold out, and I think that tells you a lot about the fashion industry, and it was also just the audacity of Virgil believing that by adding his personal mark to these Ralph Lauren shirts that he increased their value, that the sum of these two things was far more valuable than one of them alone.

Alison Stewart: Happening tangentially to this is the fashion industry turning their attention to Gen X, to hip-hop, and the NBA, which was fascinating. Would you explain that a little bit?

Robin Givhan: Yes. It was so much fun for me to go back and realize how all of these discrete dots were connected. The NBA had an image problem, it felt, and a lot of its young players were entranced by early hip-hop culture and, in particular, the gangster look, and they'd also been plagued by some violent incidents, particularly one that happened at the Palace of Auburn Hills, in Detroit, or outside of Detroit.

They instituted this dress code that banned all of the markings of hip-hop from their wardrobe when they were on team business, but not on the court, and initially, they really balked at these rules. What happened is, the entryways to these stadiums became these runways for athletes, and they leaned into fashion in a huge way. They realized they could use fashion, or at least their advisors and publicists realized that they could use fashion to build an image off the court, separate from basketball.

They realized it could be a launching pad for their own brands, so you have, all of a sudden, these mostly Black players who become these fashion icons who are appearing on the covers of magazines, who are sitting in the front rows of fashion shows, and everything gets more enhanced because menswear itself starts to have this huge impact on fashion with athleisure wear and with the blurring of gender, and then you have this massive impact on fashion, and you have Black men, who are, in fact, leading the charge. I think that really opened up a world that was ready to have a Black man stand at the top of the fashion world and dictate trends.

Alison Stewart: Virgil Abloh had an interesting thing he called the 3% rule. Would you explain that to us?

Robin Givhan: [laughs] Yes. Virgil would often say that if you changed a pre-existing object by 3%, you had in fact created something new, and he loved tinkering with pre-existing objects' ideas. He loved collaborating with companies and riffing on product. Now, I think any copyright lawyer listening would argue that that is really not an actual folk principle, and Virgil was sued, and he received plenty of cease and desist orders.

He was also very diligent about copywriting his own work, but he would say that as a way of introducing this idea of do-it-yourself creativity, that you didn't have to think about creativity as something that was really distant and formalized and required permission structure in order to engage with, that you could change things and make them your own, and that you should then take that seriously and take your creativity seriously.

I think it was both something that he used proactively, but it was also a bit of a defensive mechanism, too, because he didn't have formal fashion design training. He didn't have formal training in pattern-making, so being able to say that he was a creative person who was playing with these pre-existing ideas also took the pressure off of people looking at his work and saying, "Oh, well, that looks a little derivative," or "I've seen that before." I think he was able to have it both ways.

Alison Stewart: If you had to think of one reason, there are many reasons why he was appointed artistic director at Louis Vuitton, what do you think the main reason was?

Robin Givhan: I think Vuitton understood that it was a brand that really stood on culture, on popular culture. It was not a brand that was deeply rooted in ready-to-wear. Even though it had a history of ready-to-wear, it was a recent history, but there's no garment that is in the Vuitton vocabulary that people immediately think of when they think of Vuitton. You think of a bag.

You think of the logo. I think, in moving forward and in wanting to get the attention of a growingly increasingly diverse customer base, a younger customer base, it looked to culture, people who were exciting the culture for its next designer, and I think that was one of the big reasons why it looked at Virgil. The light was really shining on Virgil because he had just done an incredibly successful and influential collaboration with Nike. When a product at Nike excites people, it excites them in a very loud way, and people notice.

Alison Stewart: The book is really fascinating. It's called Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh. It is by Robin Givhan. Thank you for taking time to share your reporting and share your story with us.

Robin Givhan: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.